Dark Academia: Freshers Week

I’m currently doing a crash course in Dark Academia.

As anyone that’s ever been around me knows, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is one of my all-time favourite books. I’m also absolute sucker for WIZARD SCHOOL settings. Add in a Gorey-esque sense of the macabre, and this sub-genre has my name all over it. I’ve been snowballing around gathering recommendations, and my bibliography has already grown to a few hundred items. Bring it on.

I spent years feeling out the edge of where cyberpunk’s themes ended and its aesthetic began. Dark Academia is somehow even more gelatinously edge-less. It is, as they say, all vibes. I think the truth is - despite the name, and perhaps ironically - Dark Academia simply isn’t a literary genre. Cyberpunk actually began as a literary movement and then evolved into a transmedia, cross-cultural aesthetic. Dark Academia began as an aesthetic, and now people, myself included, are trying to shoe-horn some books into the trend. It is less about trying to separate the themes from the aesthetic and more about identifying the themes in the first place.

So what is Dark Academia literature? We have very few certainties. Take, for example, The Secret History. (Because it is a perfect book, obviously.) If it is our point of truth for Dark Academia then The Rules of Attraction probably qualifies well. Bret Easton Ellis’s novel is a stylish student-noir, focusing on that same type of chemically-altered, self-entitled ‘academic’ experience. Unreliable narrator; insular environment; a lot of self-loathing. Hell, same school, even! (More on that later.) But if The Rules of Attraction is (probably), then what about Prozac Nation? Same as the above, but memoir. And if that counts, well, what about Girl, Interrupted? Same vibes, but the insular environment is no longer a school. Can a mental institution be Dark Academia?

A similarly tenuous chain of logic spools from The Secret History to, say, Ninth House (as TSH, but with magic), to A Deadly Education (as Ninth House, but in a more openly magical world) to The Magicians (as A Deadly Education, but with a portal to a fantasy dimension) to, I dunno… is Fourth Wing Dark Academia?! It has a school, some OTT angst, and murderous secrets? Is that enough to qualify?

What kind of learning even counts as ‘academic’ for these purposes? The Secret History is set at a university, but the environment is really a Classics programme. If We Were Villains is also most-probably-definitely Dark Academia; that’s set on a course for budding actors. If drama’s Dark Academia, what about something like, say, The Turnout, about ballet? If ballet, what about music? Is Whiplash Dark Academia? Sport? What about Dare Me? Can deadly cheerleaders be Dark Academia?

The chains rattle out in every direction like Marley’s ghost. Dark Academia could be defined by the academic setting, the pursuit of knowledge, a setting removed from the ‘real’ world, the age of the protagonists, the distrust of institutions, or English Gothic architecture. If we follow any of those along, we will wind up in crime, domestic thriller, cozy, steampunk, Young Adult, fantasy, the Weird or the Gothic.

As a literary categorisation, Dark Academia is ‘non-exclusive’. It is dating around, having its Hot Genre Summer. More realistically, it is an aesthetic layer that can apply to stories written in virtually every genre. (Which is why when you search for book recommendations, you find discussions of ‘Are Converse Dark Academia?’.)

Does an email-based existential crisis about Dark Academia count as Dark Academia? Asking for a friend.

M.L. Rio’s If We Were Villains (2017): An aforementioned Dark Academia staple. It is very The Secret History, but instead of an insular clique of Classics students, we have an insular clique of Shakespearean wannabe actors.

Personally, I have a mixed relationship with Shakespeare. My best friend in college (who reads this, hi! I owe you an email!), once shared his healthy skepticism that nobody really likes Shakespeare, and that the people who laugh at the jokes are a) faking it, b) pretentious or c) both. (He phrased it more poignantly and precisely at the time.) I suspect some people actually find Tudor fart jokes in Iambic pentameter to be enormously amusing. I am not one of them. I’d go so far as to say that the idea of hanging out with six drama students that converse entirely in Shakespearean allusion is my notion of Hell on Earth. Everyone in this book was annoying to me, on every level. Someone murdered one of these wankers? I applaud the restraint!

All that said: this is compulsively readable, and, yes, they’re all wankers, but, yes also, this does a truly excellent job of bringing to life the cultic atmosphere of the programme, and depicting an environment where such wankery (and murder) can happen. It was a proper page-turner as well, so that’s that.

Christopher Yates’ Black Chalk (2013): Another group of terrible people, this time at Oxford. They’re playing a ‘game’, it goes TOO FAR, and, guess what, someone gets murdered! Black Chalk really embraces the unreliable narrator (we’re not even sure which terrible person they at the start), and has a lot of fun with the layered format of the story. I’m not sure it sticks the landing: the story embiggens dramatically and waves its hands around screaming ‘CONSPIRACY’, which somewhat undermines the taut, interpersonal drama of the first 95%. The insularity of the setting, of the group, of the conflict - that’s the bit that lands. A grandiose link to a Greater Scheme of Things takes us out of that conflict. Still: a good one.

Alex Michelides’ The Maidens (2021): A group of terrible people at Cambridge, studying Classics; now dropping dead. This time the protagonist is an alum, who gets stuck in to the investigation in order to protect her niece. There’s a sleazy rock star professor, a blackmail scheme, a lot of people who quote Euripedes at one another (albeit a bit clumsily), some tangential (but extremely present) references to Tennyson, and a somewhat ‘traditional’ Golden Age Crime structure to the whole thing.

I struggled with The Maidens. The suspension of disbelief was quickly and easily shattered - the mobile phones in a horror movie problem. In this case, our victims are all rich, famous, beautiful young women who are connected to wealthy and powerful international families. Yet, with the exception of a throwaway reference of ‘gosh, a lot of media showed up that day’, the investigation is conducted quietly (and poorly) by local police and our interfering amateur protagonist. If the story weren’t grounded in the ‘here and now’, it would possibly be more believable, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around a contemporary scenario in which famous, beautiful young women are being murdered at an elite university and it isn’t the most sensational news story in the world. The podcasters alone would crowd out every B&B in Cambridge.

On a similar note, everyone is also incredibly relaxed about the overt cult activity and casually dismissive of the obvious sex pest professor. Again, given both the time and the context, these should’ve set off a thousand alarms, not just to the police and the university, but to every wannabe Netflix producer in world. I’m always happy to suspend my disbelief, but The Maidens tries to up the stakes by showing how of the world it is - while, simultaneously, trying not to be in it. Especially given the goofy ending, I’m not sure this worked.

V.E. Schwab’s Vicious (2013): Two students collaborate to study ExtraOrdinary humans - e.g. superheroes! They succeed and they earn too much. Gasp! Their collaboration turns to conflict, and, hey, someone winds up dead. Lots of someones, in this case.

About half the book takes place in the past, explaining how Victor and Eli met, and their school shenanigans. The other half is set years later, after Victor has escaped prison and begun his quest for revenge. There’s a lot going on here, but Vicious is successful at weaving it all together into a more-ish novel with surprisingly serious depths.

I tend to think that superhero novels are generally not that great. The ‘four-colourness’ of superheroism is so firmly embedded in the cultural consciousness than anything less than a visual medium (comics, films) struggles to meet expectations. Vicious is at its best when it isn’t being a superhero book. The mechanics of the ExtraOrdinaries are not the book’s strength, and Vicious largely and wisely avoids treading the ground of detailed world-building or ‘cinematic’ action. Instead, Victor and Eli are both well-realised characters with a brooding will-they/won’t-they love/hate bond between them. Their emotional conflict is the heart of the novel, and transcends the inherent silliness of supehero tropes. (I realise I’ve now come out with HOT TAKES about both superheros and Shakespeare. I contain multitudes.) Vicious had a sequel published five years later, and I’m actually curious how it works as a story. Vicious itself resolves well and neatly. It is fairly dark, slightly academic,and very fun.

These four are all, more or less, hovering around a ‘core’ definition of the Dark Academia, largely as measured by vibe-proximity to The Secret History. Vicious is the most distant, but even then, this is a book about a toxic relationship between ‘friends’, an overpowering quest for knowledge, and an institutional environment that fosters a sense of elitism and inhumanity. The others are all of the above and also set entire on campus settings and, to fully ice the cake (or tart[t]), chock full of Classical allusions.

Where all of these differ from The Secret History is also important. Spoilers abound, sorry - if you don’t want Tartt’s novel spoiled, skip down to the quote block a few paragraphs below. The Secret History is about a bunch of shamelessly elitist students who get up to no good, turn on one another, and eventually get caught. So far, so good. The characters all believe that they’re the center of the universe. They do stupid, horrible things because their incredibly insular social circle becomes divorced from reality and becomes, in a sense, self-radicalising. This is aided and abetted by an institution that shields them from outside influences and creates an atmosphere that’s permissive of, um, ‘anti-social exploration’. Add in a healthy dose of narcissism, and you wind up with a group of self-absorbed young people who are entirely divorced from the rest of humanity. The characters are well and truly convinced that they are exceptional; superior to the rest of society.

But, and here’s the twist, Tartt is very careful to show in The Secret History that her characters are not elites. They’re not special; they’re ridiculous. Their attempts at grand action fail to lead to anything significant, they never achieve their goals, and, most importantly, nobody actually cares about them very much. They’re worse than disliked: they’re ignored. They’re not ostracised elites, or even rebellious outcasts. They’re uninteresting. Richard and his mates are eventually caught out - but not because there’s a massive effort to Get Them. They simply screw up. They’re not as clever as they think they are, and, Tartt shows that, despite (or because of) their narrowly-specific intellectural grandeur, they struggle to function in society. The characters are convinced of their greatness, but, the sad truth is that they’re pitiful.

(Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt attended the same university, and Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction is set at the same fictional school. More than that, it is set in the same ‘world’, and Ellis adds in a throwaway line about the weird Classics students. It is an amusing in-joke for this literary brat pack, but it also reinforces Tartt’s underlying theme. No matter how much her characters may think of themselves, no one else thinks about them at all.)

Each of four books above, whilst lurking in the shadows of The Secret History, has diverged from that core notion. Institutions and programmes and friendships that remove you from the world are bad things. The characters’ quest to become something more than ordinary have had the reverse effect: they are lessened; inconsequential.

In the Dark Academia books that follow, this theme has been reversed, and not, I think, to its benefit. We find that the characters are significant; that the programmes reward them. These institutions are still unpleasant, but somehow also appealing. Rio’s drama students are the stars of the campus, admired by all - there’s even a police officer that’s spent a decade obsessed with them. The Maidens is (to its own detriment) fixated on showing how important and enviable everyone is. Vicious is about, well, literal super-humans. (Black Chalk almost gets it - but the ending puts the characters into a greater context, and, to some degree, eschews them of their responsibility.) Everything Tartt was warning against - the detachment, the dehumanisation, the elitism, the unbridled ambition - now seems to be understood as a fundamental part of Dark Academia’s appeal.

I can’t wait to read more.

me, elsewhere

The lovely people at Blackwell’s let me take over their newsletter to talk about cyberpunk and share some of favourites. I don’t know how linkable it is, so tldr; my recs:

• The Ten Percent Thief

• Busted Synapses

• When Gravity Fails

• The Best of World SF

• Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture

Blackwell’s offers free, global shipping on all their books. If you have been eyeballing the sexxxy British editions of The Big Book of Cyberpunk (V1, V2), here’s an excellent chance. (Given the cost of shipping internationally, I genuinely don’t know how this works out for them as a business, but it really is a thing. I’ve tested it myself!)

I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but I have essays on Huckleberry Finn and Lonesome Dove included in the upcoming Literary Journeys. (Out now in the US; coming soon in the UK.) It is fair to say that this book has been on a journey of its own, but I’m very pleased to have contributed short pieces on two favourites. (I need to send a copy to my high school English teacher, as I’m not sure I did particularly well on our Huck Finn essay at the time. She’ll be relieved to know I got it right in the end.)

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what i’m up to

When I was a kid, I had a weekend job at a Software Etc (RIP), which meant I was on the GODDAMN BLEEDING EDGE of desktop gaming. I tried everything and played the hell out of it. When I was bored in the shop, I’d read the guidebooks we sold, mastering games that I never even played. Sadly, even as gaming has gotten more and more exciting, I’ve had less and less time for it (and, to be fair, less and less willingness to prioritise gaming over other hobbies, like reading books and then whining about them on the internet). When I do play anything, it’ll be my one mobile-game-of-the-moment or something extremely vintage, in half-hour bursts: in this case, Icewind Dale.

Icewind Dale, for those that never tried it, is a D&D-based adventure. It is the Neanderthal cousin of the more glamourous Baldur’s Gate series. The latter series (as we all know) indulged in complex open-worlds, sprawling character arcs, and some really impressive storytelling. Icewind Dale, on the other hand, is an old-school dungeon crawl. You min-max your characters, pick up cool weapons, and whack your way through a thoughtlessly linear adventure. Every now and then you shift to a different environment and whack at a different category of monster. Sometimes people try to dialogue at you, but you can click past that noise pretty quickly. The combat is tactical, the progression is satisfying, and I am pretty attached to my party of murder-hobo characters, even if I can’t remember their names. It isn’t, I don’t think, particularly challenging. Certainly the quick save mechanic means that there’s nothing you can’t overcome through the power of reloading and brute force.

I don’t pretend to be a good or a representative gamer, but there’s something about Icewind Dale that works for me, and where I am in my life. It is the 22-minute sitcom of video games.

About the random use of bolds. Beehiiv has many virtues, but a great search function is not one of them. I’m hoping this will make it easier for me when, in the future, I need to scan through and find references to specific books.

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